Page 20 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
Rain in Pitkin came from the east more often than not.
On top of all that, Pa’s hip had gotten worse. The old man hid it well, but Logan caught the way he gripped the banister coming down the stairs and lowered himself into a chair like a man easing into a hot bath. Testing every inch before committing his weight.
As much as the stubborn old goat refused it, he needed a doctor.
And now a baby. No name, no parents, and no explanation beyond a wicker basket, depending on this household for every breath and every meal.
They’d need bottles, cloth for diapers, and a proper crib, not a dresser drawer stuffed with quilts.
Logan sat at the kitchen table after supper, running figures in a ledger by lamplight, adding columns and scratching out lines. The numbers never came out differently, no matter how many times he worked through them. Not enough hands for the work. Not enough money for the supplies. Not enough hours in the day.
From the spare room down the hall, the baby fussed, and then Grace’s voice drifted through the door, humming that same lullaby as before.
Logan put down the pencil and looked at the doorway.
Hiswife. Astrangerwho’d arrived yesterday on sore feet with a carpetbag and a temper, who’d taken over his kitchen and his baby and apparently, as of this morning, his last name.
Simple,he’d told her.No complications.
He picked the pencil back up and went back to the numbers.
Chapter Six
Dear Jonah,
I’m writing this from a kitchen table big enough to butcher a whole elk on, which I mention because, apparently, that is a thing people do out here.
Don’t ask.
Grace chewed the end of the pencil. Without Jonah here, she wouldn’t get scolded for it. The wood tasted like cedar and graphite, but stale, in that particular way a pencil that had lived in a drawer for who knew how long grew out of date.
Stripes of morning light filled the whole kitchen. The baby dozed in the dresser drawer near the stove, making those soft grunting sounds she made between naps, the ones that sat somewhere between a piglet rooting and an old man grumbling about the weather.
The house is solid. Built to last, like everything else on this property. The man who runs it has a particular way about him that I will get to shortly.
First, I gotta tell you about the mountains.
Jonah… You cannot imagine them. I tried three times to describe them in my head before sitting down to write this, and every version came up short. They go up and up, and the snow stays on top even now, and the whole sky turns pink behind them at sundown.
You’ll see for yourself when you come.
She tapped the pencil against the paper. How much to tell him? How much could she fit onto a sheet of writing paper and still leave room for the parts that mattered?
I have been here just over a week, and already I can tell you this much: the work suits me.
The house needed tending in the worst way. Four men living alone will do that to a place. I’ve scrubbed the kitchen floor twice since arriving, and it’s only now starting to let go of whatever they spilled on it over the past two years.
The pantry had things in it I could not identify, Jonah.
I threw out a jar of something that may have once been pickles but had turned a color God never intended food to be.
A smile pulled at her mouth. Jonah would get a kick out of that.
Also… There’s a baby.
She stopped writing.
In the drawer, the little one shifted, curling a fist up against her own cheek, and the fine pale hair on the top of her head caught the light like corn silk. Ten days old, give or take, by Grace’s best reckoning. Maybe a touch more. She’d gained weight since that first morning, filling out in the cheeks and the creases of her wrists, and her color had gone from angry red towarm peach that deepened to pink whenever she worked herself up for a cry.
